Lit Hub Daily: February 13, 2020

• “Obama-the-writer came before Obama-the-candidate.” How the president’s reading shaped his writing. | Lit Hub
• Andrea Bernstein on the Trumps, the Kushners, and a family tradition of corruption and grift. | Lit Hub Politics
• An intimate view into medically assisted death: Diane Rehm attends to her friend, Bill, in his last months. | Lit Hub
• Hollywood is a ruff town, but these legendary leading canines still managed to be very good boys (sorry). | Lit Hub
• Leah Hager Cohen on Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, Leslie Jamison on Jenny Offill’s Weather, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• Charles Dickens presaged the rise of the true crime podcast: Susan Cook on Barnaby Rudge and the history of week-by-week storytelling. | CrimeReads
• “How could a landscape evoke such feelings?” Karl Ove Knausgaard goes into the Black Forest with the legendary artist Anselm Kiefer. | The New York Times Magazine
• A Purple Heart, a Smith Corona, an old icebox: take a look inside Indianapolis’ Kurt Vonnegut Museum. | Hyperallergic
• “Perhaps no other variety of speech has been quite so significant, innovative, and influential to the development of standard American English.” On the impact of Black English. | JSTOR
• Anna Burns’ Milkman and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing are in the running for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Literary Prize (an award named after a British ambassador murdered by the IRA). | The Irish Times
• Middle grade author Jason Reynolds explains why much of his award-winning work caters to middle school age black children. | Essence
• “To be a woman close to David Foster Wallace means mattering not as a specific human but as a convenient peg for a set of his ideas.” On Adrienne Miller’s In the Land of Men and powerful men in the age of print. | The New Republic
• These 10 works of eco-fiction confront the story of our climate crisis and relationship to nature. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: How did Louis C.K. get away with it for so long? • Remembering Harry Matthews, poet and friend: A remembrance from Arlo Haskell, and two poems from Collected Works, 1946-2016 • Read an excerpt from Amina Cain’s debut novel Indelicacy.